RESEARCH PAPER · EXAMPLE
Mill Creek — looking for evidence
ABSTRACT
A working bibliography toward an essay on the human substrate of Mill Creek Valley before, during, and after the 1959–1961 clearance. The cards I keep returning to are the Washington Park Cemetery name indices — they pin specific addresses to specific people on specific days, and they cover the decades the demolition map erased. Paired with the Tiffany antebellum bonds and one Sievers Studio frame from 1958, they begin to sketch the continuity the urban-renewal narrative declines to acknowledge.
RECORDS IN THIS PAPER
5 records
WHY THIS MATTERS
Antebellum legal substrate. The Free Negro Bond establishes that a documented free Black population existed in St. Louis a century before the Mill Creek demolition — a continuity the urban-renewal record tends to flatten into a single mid-century image. Tiffany Collection provenance also positions this within a manuscript set rich enough to support a chapter, not just a citation.
Undated · death recorded 1926
Card Index Entry for Hodges, Floyd
Washington Park Cemetery Card Index, 1920-1989
WHY THIS MATTERS
Hodges, Floyd — 2626 Lawton, d. 1926 February 18. Lawton Avenue ran through the heart of what would later be designated the Mill Creek clearance zone. The card is small but specific: a named resident, a street address, a year well before the Sanborn maps that justified the demolition. Useful as the earliest anchor on the timeline.
Undated · death recorded 1943
Card Index Entry for Brown, Irene
Washington Park Cemetery Card Index, 1920-1989
WHY THIS MATTERS
Brown, Irene — 4261 West Aldine, d. 1943 December 25. West Aldine is within the cleared footprint. The wartime date matters: this is a working-class household persisting through a federal-jobs boom that the post-war demolition would shortly displace. The Christmas Day death adds a private weight to the documentary record.
Undated · death recorded 1971
Card Index Entry for Lane, Carrie Mae
Washington Park Cemetery Card Index, 1920-1989
WHY THIS MATTERS
Lane, Carrie Mae — 4526 Garfield, d. 1971 July 3. Garfield is north of the Mill Creek clearance zone. A decade after demolition, residents had relocated; the card index follows them. Evidence of dispersal pattern, paired with the earlier Aldine and Lawton entries.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Retirement luncheon at the Coronado Hotel, August 1958. Same year the first Mill Creek parcels were being condemned. The Sievers archive documents downtown civic life at the same temporal cross-section the cemetery cards document the neighborhood being cleared. The juxtaposition is not equivalence — it is the working argument that the demolition was a series of decisions, signed by named officials, during business hours, while other St. Louisans were being photographed at banquets.